Vagabond Editorials

By Jack Dionne

The other day I saw experiments of various kinds conducted with a new building material. It was at once amazing and convincing. It was a lumberman who was doing the experimenting. I can truthfully say that I never saw a building product of such great practical usefulness. You can do more useful things with that stufi, and things of huge variety, than is easy to believe. It can be'sold and used for a thousand practical building purposes. I got a real "kick" out of the demonstrations. And the wonderful thing about it is that it is manufactured byr afirm that doesn't believe lumber journal advertising pays. Obviously it would be of no value to this, producer if I were to tell the thousands of retailers who are reading these words, just what that material is, and the amazing things that can be done with it. Otherwise it would make a great story.

A sideline that the lumber merchant can sell, any time of the year and in any sort of territory, is cedar lining for closets and clothes rooms. There isn't a home anywhere, unless it's brand new and fully equipped, that doesn't need at least one cedar lined closet. The live merchant can sell that idea to the wife of the farmer, or to the wife ofl the city mansion owner. You can take the old closet and cedar line it, or you can build a new cedar lined closet, or you can show Jhem how to go into their attic and board off a big closet space, cedar line it, and have a wonderful place for their clothes to hang in or out of season, where the moths will not touch them, and the creeping, crawling things will not venture. It doesn't make any difference how bad business is in YOUR territory, you CAN sell cedar linin! for closets. Anyone can that goes out and tries. While you're waiting for new homes to develop, make some money out of old hornes.

That's the thing .n", "L"1," lnn""t" to me with regard to built-ins. You can sell them when there isn't a house billin sight. The same instinct that causes people to buy new clothes, and hats, and shoes for the new season, will make them interested in renewing their old homes. particularly the kitchen and the bedrooms. I went into a big rambling old home the other day that had just been fixed up with built-ins. In one big bedroom they had installed a built-in fixture, without even building it in. It was a three-unit piece, with a vanity in the center, a cedar-lined closet on one side, and a wardrobe with drawers, shoe rack, 'etc., on, the other. Having plenty of room they just nailed it to the wall in a corner, and it made'a wonderful room out of what had been a big and barrerr one. Oh, my retail friends ! If you'll just inject a little brains and energy into your merchandising, it won't make any difference whether you sell house bills or not. You can still do a wonderful business'

The National Retail Hardware Association has a slogan that's worth while. Here'Tis. "Business is THERE. It's up to the individual t6 bring it HERE." This association preaches and teaches its members that there is alwayS plenty of potential business in any and every territory, no matter how bad business may seem, looked at from the purely drop-in viewpoint. I believe that just as firmly as I believe in, the pulling power of gravity, the killing quality of carbolic acid, and the laxative effects of castor oil.

I have just finished reading a booklet on "Business Opportunities" issued by that organization, ten full pages of which is devoted to telling and showing by means of maps, how a little onehorse retail hardware merchant in a town of less than a thousand people, located in, the center of an agricultural district of Illinois, created a marvelous demand for stoves and ranges, at a time when the stove and r:rnge business was so dead that he had not had a drop-in sale of that sort formonths. It's a great story, and one that would appeal to every ru;al *relriler of lumber.

It recites a genuine effort to create business where there apparently was not any. It shows beyond a doubt how magnificently such things CAN be done. This small town dealer whose stove and range business was dead, hired a high school boy in vacation time to go out in a Ford, stop at every human habitation in the mapped out sales district of this retailer, and bring in a card for every habitation listing the stoves and heaters used" the make and age of each, whether or not the occupant owned the property or was a renter, the name of the owner, etc. It cost him just $18 to get this complete file of information. With this in hand he made some most interesting reference maps of his sales territory, and went out, himself, to do the selling. He sold more stoves and ranges in two weeks than he had sold in the previous two years, and built up a future prospect chart that will be continuous. This school boy, for $18, listed seventy thousand dollars worth of prospective business for this hardware dealer, in stoves, ranges and fences alone.

***

Apply that same sort of -enterprise to the retail lumber business. There isn't a lumber territory discoverable where automatic business is more thoroughly dead-apparentlythan in this hardware dealer's district. I have no authority

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